Debian To Carry Patches For GNOME Dynamic Triple Buffering

[anarsoul]

If iirc this patch won't get upstreamed because it basically works around bad behaviour in GPU drivers as the expense of increased power usage.

Thus upstream won't carry it because the gain does not outweigh the cost and they'd rather fix the protocol/driver issues than monkey patch around them.

Unfortunately the driver doesn't have a crystal ball to predict what workload the app will have in future.

[Veto]

Great with yet another Gnome vs KDE vs ... thread
Personally I was a bit hesitant of switching to Gnome (from Unity), as it seemed so different and bare-bones. However, now I love how Gnome is so easy to use using mostly/only the keyboard - everything is just a few keystrokes or shortcuts away. Also it just gets out of the way with minimal screen usage. I don't even bother with extensions anymore - just let me use my apps, please. Most other desktops just seem so old-fashioned, mouse oriented and Windows look-a-likes. Hell, even Windows seems to become more Gnome-like.
... And after some great work by Daniel van Vugt and the other Gnome developers, it now feels smooth and responsive (it was rather slow and laggy...)

[Myownfriend]

[*]The nautilus file manager is just painful compared to dolphin. The "favourites" method in nautilus is glitchy i find, I also like the shortcuts in dolphin manager.

Nautilius could definitely be better but I don't really find it to be slowing me down much.

[*]Applications menu, yes this is a "traditional" desktop paradigm... its old, and Gnome seems to want to be edgy and current (whatever that means to them), but its effective and again I dont want my DE slowing me down in any way.

Do you mean the applications menu as in a Start menu sense or in the Gnome/MacOS sense where it's a menu relating to the currently selected application?

In the start menu sense, I absolutely prefer how Gnome does it compared to KDE for example. I like having large buttons, I like that it doesn't automaticaly create categories for software, and I like that I can group, ungroup, and sort things icons in my own way. It doesn't really slow me down either. A button on my mouth brings up the overview so it's just one more click to bring up the applications and there's a big click area to hit the icon quickly.

I don't see what's so "edgy" about it. If you can't live without it, Gnome still officially maintains an extension that ships with Gnome called Application Menu that adds a Gnome 2.0 style applications menu. They also have one for a Window List.

[QUOTE=zexelon;n1350018][*]This last one is really personal and pedantic... themes... Gnome just sucks to make it look remotely pleasing these days. I get it, we are all supposed to be using apps through our browser, electron, snap or some such thing, but there is still a place for making things look at least not ugly and somewhat uniform! I spend the vast majority of my day staring at the DE interface and its window manager... its nice to feel comfortable in it and never notice is because it is seamless and out of the way./QUOTE]

There's not too much to Gnome's interface that is always showing though. When you're using an application, the only presence of Gnome is the a black top bar with the time, app name, and system area.

[mxan]

openSUSE and it's very relevant. Not only because of its history, but also because (at least here in Europe) it sees corporate use.

openSUSE might prefer Plasma, but the corporate-used SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop only ships GNOME. And fwiw, openSUSE is also a great distribution for GNOME users - Tumblweed especially tends to be the first distribution shipping the newest GNOME versions.

[nist]

To be honest, Debian is the only Linux distro for me. Recently, I was looking for an updated distro for my new PC, with an Intel gen. 11 cpu, to install in it. I really, really tried all the famous distros today available (also Ubuntu, for those that don't understand), except Arch and Gentoo (do not meet my needs). All trashed (the use of the word trash is not casual). Also tried to use a different DE, all trashed (the use of the word trash is not casual). Distros and DEs trashed for independent reasons. The last resource was Debian (testing, or in other words the next stable). Got the non-free firmware version net iso and installed, with Xfce4. Perfect. Should I add more? Yes: in about 23 years of Linux, Debian has been the less problematic linux distro for me.
I hope Debian remains independent also in the future, because I have serious doubts about the Debian future.

[Britoid]

If iirc this patch won't get upstreamed because it basically works around bad behaviour in GPU drivers as the expense of increased power usage.

Thus upstream won't carry it because the gain does not outweigh the cost and they'd rather fix the protocol/driver issues than monkey patch around them.

[QwertyChouskie]

QwertyChouskie okay the comic sans font is awesome

WRT the key bindings, yes I had dug into that but could not find a way to remap "expose" from the left windows (meta?) key. I spent several days on it. I finally got some scripts hacked together that I could bind to a key combination that I could then tie to a mouse button... but it was really glitchy, some times it would work other times it randomly would not and I would have to hit the mouse button several times to get expose to come up.

I have worked with the rest of your suggestions and personally really like Burn My Windows, it has no parallel that I have found in KDE from a pure look. Its also part of the issue though, to get Gnome to work lots of add-ons have to be plugged in, and then if the devs happen to "tweak" something in the API it all falls down and you have to hope the add-on maker is still interested in maintaining it.

At the end of the day, its all a matter of choice and personal preferences, heck tiling window managers (and the tiling addon from Pop_OS for Gnome) still bend my mind, I have not been able to use that workflow yet!

"Show the overview" is the keybind you're looking for

[zexelon]

QwertyChouskie okay the comic sans font is awesome

WRT the key bindings, yes I had dug into that but could not find a way to remap "expose" from the left windows (meta?) key. I spent several days on it. I finally got some scripts hacked together that I could bind to a key combination that I could then tie to a mouse button... but it was really glitchy, some times it would work other times it randomly would not and I would have to hit the mouse button several times to get expose to come up.

I have worked with the rest of your suggestions and personally really like Burn My Windows, it has no parallel that I have found in KDE from a pure look. Its also part of the issue though, to get Gnome to work lots of add-ons have to be plugged in, and then if the devs happen to "tweak" something in the API it all falls down and you have to hope the add-on maker is still interested in maintaining it.

At the end of the day, its all a matter of choice and personal preferences, heck tiling window managers (and the tiling addon from Pop_OS for Gnome) still bend my mind, I have not been able to use that workflow yet!

[QwertyChouskie]

And I am always baffled by these quotes

The point is the DE should NEVER be a hindrance to productive work and Gnome often is. Gnome has never broken for me per say (except when Nautilus spaz'ed out last year on me and filled my whole drive space by writing to a log file continuously for several hours... that took a while to fix, an update appears to have solved that issue though).

Take the following as a PERSONAL list of challenges I have had with Gnome:

1. Key bindings in Gnome... this is a huge pain point, I can not for example rebind the "expose" key. In my job I have to alternate between many windows and tasks so I have found that binding as many of the DE functions to the mouse (i use a logitech MMO mouse to accelerate this) allows window management and alternating functions to happen much faster. For the life of me I could not re-bind the Gnome expose button. I found numerous hacks, but they were very glitchy.

System Settings -> Keyboard -> "View and Customize Shortcuts" lets you remap basically any function, and even add your own shortcuts (e.g. I map `asusctl profile -n` to Fn+F5 so I can change fan/performance profiles on my Asus laptop). The only downside is that there doesn't seem to be an easy way to map to mouse buttons directly, but you could probably use something like AutoKey to map a mouse button to a keyboard combo, then tell Gnome how to interpret that keyboard combo.

2. The nautilus file manager is just painful compared to dolphin. The "favourites" method in nautilus is glitchy i find, I also like the shortcuts in dolphin manager.

Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of Nautilus either (lack of type-ahead is the main dealbreaker for me, so I just use Thunar instead).

3. Applications menu, yes this is a "traditional" desktop paradigm... its old, and Gnome seems to want to be edgy and current (whatever that means to them), but its effective and again I don't want my DE slowing me down in any way.

I can't really speak to this one, I always use the search myself as I find it way faster than clicking and scrolling through folders and lists to try to find what I'm looking for. (I have way too many applications installed, so at least for me a menu-based approach is a no-go.)

4. This last one is really personal and pedantic... themes... Gnome just sucks to make it look remotely pleasing these days. I get it, we are all supposed to be using apps through our browser, electron, snap or some such thing, but there is still a place for making things look at least not ugly and somewhat uniform! I spend the vast majority of my day staring at the DE interface and its window manager... its nice to feel comfortable in it and never notice is because it is seamless and out of the way.[/LIST]

Check out the newly-released Gradience for theming applications, for the shell itself, the Blur My Shell, Burn My Windows, and Desktop Cube extensions are some of my favorites. Blur My Shell makes the overview not filled with oppressive gray, which I very much appreciate. For Burn My Windows, I use Hexagon as my open-window effect, and TV effect for closing windows. It just adds a bit of nice flair without being too crazy, though of course you can totally go for crazy effects too. Desktop Cube is a nice modern take on the classic Compiz effect, it fits surprisingly nicely with Gnome's horizontal workspace paradigm.

Oh, and of course, don't forget to use Gnome Tweaks to set your system font as Comic Sans

[tachi]

I wish they would care about KDE Plasma too as much as they care about Gnome!
The whole PipeWire for Gnome only made me think they don't.

It's not that they don't care about KDE Plasma, it's just that different DEs are maintained by different teams with different opinions. As I mentioned in the PipeWire for Debian thread, it's the default only on gnome because only the gnome maintainer decided to replace "Depends: pulseaudio" with "Depends: pipewire-pulse". For the most part, decisions are made individually by the respective package maintainers.